Our Obscure Ancestor taught that “you can’t step into the same river twice.” Translation, at the risk of falling into the icy waters of unsalutary clarity: “Step into the river!”

“For two and a half millennia, poor creatures will learn to forget how to step into the river. For two and a half millennia, poor creatures will learn to step only into their ideas.”

Will these poor creatures survive all this unlearning? Will the river survive all this forgetting?

The world is in fragments.

The world was born whole, but everywhere it is in fragments.

The world was born whole and not whole, but everywhere it is in fragments.

The “End of the American Way of Life” was announced long ago.1 But has Our Ancestor’s Word of the imminent End of Civilization spread far and wide? Has his Word of the imminent End of Reality Itself, the seemingly immovable bedrock of Civilization, spread near and deep?

This bedrock is that on which the civilized sleep and which turns them to stone. Hasn’t the quest for surreality for the past 2500 years—or for perhaps the last 30,000 years—been the struggle to pass beyond Reality and thus to signal its immanent End?

Surreality and surregionality have been on the side of the Real in the millennia-long war against Reality. The Real is defined technically as “that which bats last.”2

The battle is reaching its conclusion. Our day is a cloudy day for Civilization. A pre-Ancientist wind is blowing. Il fait Grec. It’s beginning to rain on the parade of horrors in which happiness, wisdom, and virtue have all marched to the slaughter.

We reach the inescapable conclusion about a seemingly inescapable condition. Reality was really bad, while it lasted. Now we face the Real. And we face the real question : What was our real face, before Reality began ?

We must practice la Pensée Sauvage. This exquisitely beautiful French phrase translates as practice of “the Wild Flower of the Mind.” Our Ancester was a Savage of the City in a first flowering of Wild Mind within the walls.

Our Obscure Ancestor diagnosed, several thousand years before the onset of its acute stages, the late civilizational disease : Attention Deficit Hyperpassivity Disorder. He also prescribed the cure: Post-Traumatic Surrealist Dialectic.

Surreality is Überwirklichkeit or, to capture (if only in part) the multiplicity, the prepositional logic, of the motion in place of its being becoming, Anaufhinterinnebenüberuntervorzwichenwirlichkeit.

According to legend, our Pre-Ancientist Ancestor renounced the throne. He rejected the arché of archaic archism. According to legend, he chose “playing knucklebones” over making laws.

Our Ancestor invented logodecentralism as a cure for Civilization’s cult of the reified, mummified pseudo-logos, the ossified, non-dialectical logos of nogo-centrism, super no va ismo, in the end, the non-logos of the logo, the eternal return of the same, the ever-transforming same of domination. Or it invented him.

According to legend, Our Ancestor came to “hate his kind,” and wandered the mountains “like a wild beast” munching on herbs and grasses. In non-reality, he was traumatized by the writing on the city walls, foreseeing the centuries of brutal Reality to come.

As is so often the case, the legend reveals the truth in its opposition. Our Ancestor hated his kind only out of love for his kind, the kind kind who revere the Common, or are capable of such reverence. Out of deep love he warned them of their growing monstrosity. For Our Ancestor, the Neighbor Monster was rearing its ugly head but was not ex rerum natura.

Our Ancestor was certainly a “wild beast,” begotten of Eris to terrorize the lethargic, domesticated beasts that had lost their ferocity of thought and action.

Our Ancestor wandered the metaphorical mountains, the heights of spirit, and practiced the Wild wherever he roamed. Above all, and below all, in the city. He knew that nowhere are we closer to nature than at its wild center, if we can find it. Even the heart of the city, the stones cry out, and raise themselves up! Sous les pavés, la rage!

Our Obscure Ancestor was the first to erect that fateful ontological road sign on the highway of history, “l’Ecart Absolu.” Warning to travelers in search of the Way! Dangerous intersection! Detour from Disordered Civilization via Chaotic Harmony.”

Our Ancestor exhorted us to “distinguish each thing according to its nature” Back to the Things Themselves! He was an Unfounding Father of Object Disoriented Ontology. The true non-nature of the Thing is absurd, irrational, or even inexistent, from the standpoint of Reality. And from the standpoint of the Real, it is not what you expected, off course.

Our Ancestor lamented the fact that multitudes are “as neglectful of what they do when awake as they are when asleep.” He taught that it is necessary to pay special attention to what we do while asleep. If our sleep practice is catastrophic, our waking practice will be a disaster(in the merely negative senses of these ambivalent terms).

Above all, urges Our Ancestor, “we should allow ourselves be guided by what is Common to all.” “Allow ourselves,’’ he says, for it is what happens when we surrender our resistances, and let go of the reactive, desiccated, mineralized self-atom. The thing-like self opens into the multitude of Things. Thus, the most singular and the most particular are also in their most profound depths and their most vast expanses the most Common.

Our Ancestor bemoans the fact that although “the Logos is common to all,” most “live as if each of them had a private intelligence.” But “private intelligence” is neither private nor intelligent. It is a private stupidity that turns out to possess only the illusion of privacy. It is instructive that the word “idiot” comes from the Greek idiōtēs, meaning “a private person.”Privatization is idiotization.

No one owns the truth. It is community property, non-propertarian property. Propertization it the most effective means of killing anything or anybody, including the living truth. Proudhon, one of the most idiotic of all anti-idiots, infamously proclaimed that “Property is Theft,” but our Obscure Ancestor revealed long before that the much more shocking truth that “Property is Death.”

Property, as Our Ancestor foresaw, has meant the slow death of the Common, and of the Community. As property has expanded, so has the ego, at the expense of the Common. Our Common wealth has been replaced by the Ego and its property. Our Common Dreams have been replaced by the Ego’s petty fantasies. The Ego and its Onanism.

“Lovers of Wisdom,” advises our Ancestor, must “acquaint themselves with a great many particulars.” Dear Self: “May I have the pleasure of introducing you to some fascinating particulars?” But which Self to introduce? Oh, the dilemmas of social nicessities!

As our Ancestor reports, “I have searched myself.” There is some work of searching, of preduction, that must be accomplished before we can undertake any introduction. We must be sure that we are not leading ourselves on.

First, we must hunt down a self, a “suspect,” and then, when we finally interpellate some poor hapless “subject” of the investigation, we must search it and question it. Who? What? Where? When? Why? Finally, after working over our suspect without mercy, we find that the big news in this ontological police report is that there is no news. No news about the subject. Just some particulars.

We may think that we have ensnared the self when we find that the self is “myself.” But then we have to begin the search for the “my” that has that self in its possession. We are tempted to conclude, as others have before our so-called selves, that the My is neither Mr nor Ms but Mystery.

The “self” which is a self that is no self is neither a monad nor a nomad, but rather a communad and a meonad, a munad. The self that is ego is a desperately mad monad and an obsessively mad nomad, an I-go. It is driven by its atomic power to seek that which it already has (by not having) and cannot possibly find (by seeking).

Our Ancestor noted that “Seekers after gold dig up much earth and find little.” As was later proclaimed by his descendent, the Mysterious Disappearing Anarchist, “gold's a devilish sort of a thing. When you have it your soul is no longer the same as it was before.”3 Our Ancestor saw clearly that, if allowed to, these seekers would keep seeking, digging, refining, and unfinding until there was no Earth left. And no Soul.

In this spirit Our Ancestor proclaimed, “May you have plenty of wealth, you men of Ephesus, in order that you may be punished for your evil ways.” The greatest wealth, whether golden gold or black gold (brutish petroleum), always brings the greatest calamity to heart and hearth, home and homeland.

According to our Ancestor, Wisdom means “giving heed to the nature of things.” It means paying attention to the naturing nature of things, to their becoming and unbecoming themselves, to their animate and reanimating being.

Our Ancestor revealed the perils of mere sleep, whether nocturnal or diurnal. That is, he urges us always to dream. The Common reveals itself above all in dreams. Our Ancestor implores us to learn the language of the Oneiric Commons.

Our Ancestor warned that “the waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own.” But we must realize that this private world is not private, this “own” world is not one’s own, except in the privative sense of lacking the Common. “Ownness” is nothingness.

Our Ancestor taught (perhaps at times obscurely) that “Nature loves to hide.” Therefore, awakened experiencing is the practice of ontoanarchaelogy (the anarchaelogy of ὄν), and especially, meontoanarchology (the anarchaelogy of μή ὄν), the explorations of the historicity and regionality of being and “non”-being, being-empty being, interbeing. “Non”-being is the fullest kind of being, being that overflows all boundaries. The practice of the “ology” of that.

In short, awakened being, being awakened, is surregional exploration! We become Hidden Nature uncovering Hidden Nature, both having been buried under layers of brute Reality.

Yet, brute reality prevails. As Our Ancestor predicted, in Late Civilizationism, we murder to dissect. Murderous clarity reigns over the obscurity of life, the vagueness of the Way.

Dissectarianism emerged with the religious fundamentalism and obsessive literalistic reductionism of sixteenth-century protomodernity.

Dissectarianism triumphed with the archic and agoric fundamentalism of political and economistic pararationality, raison d’état and raison d’achat.

Dissectarianism perfected itself ideologically in dissectarian analytical technological pararationality, and its Evil Twin, dissectarian analytical philosophical pararationality. We are left with the spiritual desolation of dystopian dissectarian paranormality on Evil-Twin Anti-Earth.

Still, the hidden remains hidden, and continues, with imperious subtlety, to unhide itself. Our Ancestor warned that “unless you expect the unexpected you will never find it.” Or worse, that we will find it without finding it.

We all have a Ghost Problem.

So recognize it, by practicing recognizing it. The truth is always unexpected, hidden under a mountain of expectedness. The struggle for truth is the struggle between everydayness and everymomentness.

So follow the rule against rules: Always expect the unexpected and always unexpect the expected.

Our Ancestor revealed that Reality trashes unexpected traumatic truths and leaves us with everyday ordinary expected banalities. Dialectic teaches that Truth emerges from Trauma. Surrealism teaches that Truth emerges from Traum. One way or the other, it is a leap into the abyss, the abyss of the world, and the abyss of consciousness, a return to the source, a disorienting encounter with the Shaktian Shock of Traumamatic creative energy, a return to Pre-Ancienticity, the Shaktian Age, to B.C.E., Before the Currentless and Commonless Era.

Our Ancestor observed that “everything flows and nothing abides. Everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” You can’t step into the same river twice, and the river can’t flow by the same you twice. The fantasy of controlling one river once produces the reality of destroying many rivers repeatedly.

Our Ancestor taught that “all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife.” Throw yourself into the maelstrom. Feel free to be compelled. Think contradiction! No, don’t! Think contradiction!

The late civilizational They is increasingly inclined to say “The thing is, is that…” One even hears that “The thing is, is, is that. . . .” But the They is wrong! “The thing is, is that, no, “The Thing isn’t!” To begin with. And to end with. And to begin with again.

The They claims repeatedly that “it is what it is.” But the They is wrong! No, it is not what it is! Smash Isism! Smash Isismic Fundamentalism!

By the canons of strict Heraclitean dialectical logic, and Object Disoriented Ontology, The Thing always is what it is not and is not what it is. Think contradiction! Thing contradiction! Think contra-Ding-tion! Be unrealistic, the Impossible demands you! The Impossible Real demands you!

Our Ancestor taught that the universe is “the same for all.” In its very difference, in its absolute difference, it is the same for all and common to all. Vivez la différence! Or, as surregionalists say, “la différonce.” May we have profound reverence for the uniqueness of each and every bramble that rambles through the Field! Vive l’Auto-géronce!

Our Ancestor noted that “every beast is driven to pasture by a blow.” This signifies that even the most domesticated beast in its lethargic state can be awakened by a sublime shock and spurred into motion. But such a beast is aroused by the whip or the stick of state only enough to be sent to pasture and then led to the slaughter.

It is only the wild beast that roams freely and exposes itself willingly to the violent shock of unleashed lightning.

Out Ancestor saw “the best and wisest soul” as “a dry beam of light.” With an identical inspiration, bluesman (cafardian) Blind Willie Johnson wandered from land to land asking, “What is the soul of a man?” Like Our Ancestor, this ascending descendant discovered that it was “nothing but a burning light.” The Soul, the immanent, indwelling Logos, is a nothingness that is nevertheless Really Something! A burning, blinding, eye-opening light!

Our Ancestor observed of fools that “when present they are absent.” Their absent presence proliferates in the Empire of Absence, the Globulized Empire of Neo-Libriumism. Their ranks populate the vast Armies of the Undead, and supply the Rulers of Reality, the Floundering Fathers of the United States of Absentia.

Whereas Reality is the absence of the present, Surreality, on the other (empty) hand, is Real Presence, including the Real Presence of the Absent. It is true that the truth of the truth is always deferred, always absent, but at the same time what is most crucial is that one defer to the truth of the truth that is present in its deferral.

With acute insight, Our Ancestor judged bigotry to be “the sacred disease.” Mere reasonableness withers beside deep conviction. Reflective equilibrium falters in the face of fanaticism. Only the sacred can successfully combat the pseudo- sacred. What mystification can withstand the mysterium tremendum?

Our Ancestor offered the indispensable house-cleaning advice that “corpses are more fit to be thrown out than dung.” Reality is a process of hoarding the dead. It is the endless accumulation of corpses. Throw out the corpses, but don’t waste the dung! says Our Ancestor. The Way up and the Way down are paved with dung.

What is true of the Way of things is true of the Way of thoughts. There are dead ideas and dung ideas, sterile ones and fertile ones. If ideas are rotting in the mind, throw them out. If they are dead and buried, throw them out once more.

Our Ancestor teaches the absurdity of the illusion of “the rational individual,” for, as he points out, “there is intelligence only in what encompasses.” Indeed, he shows that there is no “individual” at all, only dividuals, that is, divisions—that are provisional, at most—of the indivisible. Rationalism is a fraud. Don’t ration mind.

Yet, there is a larger Surrationalism. It comes whenever one is open to the en-compassing, when one is open to all. The en means both “around” and “in.” The encompassing Logos is identical with the Logos “within” the dividual, and wild imagination is the link between the two.

That’s why our deepest and widest dreams are dreams of the Wild Logos that leads beyond beyond dividuality. They are Dreams of the Earth and Dreams of the Universe, of the encompassing Cosmos/Chaos.

Our Ancestor warned that “there await men after death such things as they neither expect nor have any conception of.” His advice was not for the dead or deadened, but only for those who are capable of awakening from death.. After awakening comes the unexpected, the inconceivable. After the Death of Reality comes life.

Our Ancestor held out the hope that some will “arise into wakefulness and become guardians of the living and the dead.” Our Ancestor’s guardian class is composed of the Night Watchman Flame Keepers, the class that is no class and that rules without ruling. These guardians guard through their awakened mind and all-embracing spirit, showing boundless compassion, even for the dead, watching over them in the Dead of Night.

The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof, unveiled by Our Ancestor two and a half millennia ago: “They pray to images, much as if they were to talk to houses; for they do not know what gods and heroes are.” Which is to say that the struggle over fetishism is a struggle, to the death, or to the life, between a degraded imaginary and an awakened one.

Our Ancestor noted that “when defiled,” madmen “purify themselves with blood, as though one who had stepped into filth were to wash himself with filth.” The most concise précis ever given of the functioning of the primordial Law of the Father and the eternal Déraison d’Etat.

Our Ancestor advises that “extinguishing hubris is needed more than extinguishing a fire.” That is, we must refrain from extinguishing the fire. Some life forms can only germinate through fire. In the end, hubris immolates forests while extinguishing fire.

In the Spirit of the Dreaming Butterfly, Our Ancestor once observed that “sea water is at once very pure and very foul: it is drinkable and healthful for fishes, but undrinkable and deadly for men.” His message was that Reality demands no less than that we swallow the sea and die. He was giving us an antidote, a Black Drink that will help us vomit up Reality and live.

Our Ancestor, the Great Tour-Guide, revealed that “the way up and the way down are one and the same.” Opposites are not opposites. That is, of course, why we call them opposites. He advises us to tear up the map and read the territory. It tells us that if we continue on our present path it is likely that we will end up where we are headed. We are about to see the downside of the downside. The situation shows tragic promise.

Our Ancestor said that “we do and do not step into the same rivers.” We and not we. We do and not do. We do without doing.

Our Ancestor was among the first to see that the Spirit is a Bone. And not a Bone. “The bones connected by joints are at once a unitary whole and not a unitary whole.” He has a bone to pick with oneness and a bone to pick with manyness.

Bone up on this: “To be in agreement is to differ; the concordant is the discordant. From out of all the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness comes all the many particulars.” A single step begins with a journey of a thousand miles. One only follows the path when one is prepared to go nowhere.

Our Ancestor (or his Logos) judged “the hidden harmony” or “attunement” to be “better than the obvious.” The best harmony is most obviously hidden. The most obvious harmony conforms to an imposed order that is hidden in the least obvious ways and is the most disastrous form of disorder. This is contrived harmony, the harmony of domination, the stasis of chaos.

Such a bogus reconciliation and an ersatz harmony is sometimes called “law and order,” sometimes called “winning hearts and minds.” It must be replaced by a real reconciliation and real harmony that blocks the way to reconciliation and harmony.

“Hidden harmony” is only an ironic term for the most obvious and chaotic nature of things when things are attended to.

Our Ancestor advised that “listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to acknowledge that all things are one.” And, as he added, without needing to say the word, “None.”

Our Ancestor taught that “Wisdom is one and unique.” It is Zeus and Anti-Zeus. But Zeus non-Zeus is also “day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger.” This is the point of contention between the one-sided many of Reality and the many-sided one of the Real, which constantly blind-sides the Cyclopean Monster Reality. In the long run, the Real will win in the duel against dualism. Raise your eyes.

Our Oneiric Ancestor revealed that “even sleepers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe.” If they are awakened dreamers. Our Ancestor discovered the Secret of the Dream Work, work that begins long before we realize that we are engaged in it, and that we can continue, with various degrees of awareness, long after the dream itself has seemingly and dreamingly ended.

And what if we are not awakened dreamers? Even the merest of sleepers are diligent workers and collaborators, if only with Reality and the Regime.

Our Ancestor warned that some “know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep.” We must, he taught, maintain awareness in sleep. We must learn the Art of Awakened Sleeping. An essential anti-essentializing part of the Noble Common Upward Downward Path is Right Dreamfulness.

Our Ancestor reveals that the essence of wisdom is just “one thing.” How simple, we might think. But it turns out that this one thing is simple only in its momentous complexity. It is “to know the intelligence by which all things are steered through all things.” The “one thing” leads to the chaotic harmony through which “all things” are related to “all things,” the infinitely expansive, infinitely mirroring Jewel Net of Indra.

Note that things “are steered” through things. There is an interpenetration and identity of all that is seemingly opposed. Externality is also internality (in the cosmic economy as in the human economy and the earth economy). Our everyday experience of Reality belies and betrays these truths (reveals them only secretly in its contradictions), but they are exactly as we know them to be in our dreams. Dream logic is the logic of things.

Our Ancestor observes of “It” that “it scatters and it gathers; it advances and retires.” That’s what It does. The It that gives. Reality, on the other hand, seeks to gather infinitely and to advance infinitely. Reality thus encounters infinite disaster.

Our Ancestor noted that “it is a weariness to labor for the same masters and be ruled by them.” Our Ancestor found domination to be a drag. Therefore, the only good rule is a non-rule—certainly not “a dead rule,” which is the kind we find all around us. The Undead rule through dead rules. The way of non-rule is to be ruled through the non-rule of the Way, the Logos.

Our Ancestor points out that “dogs bark at every one they do not know.” Domestication and confinement to the cage of reality provoke fear of the stranger. But a dog does not ordinarily begin by barking at every dog it doesn’t know. Our Ancestor called them dogs because they are not dogs. Does a dog have a barker nature? Moo!

Our Ancestor, in his assault on Reality, laid the foundationless foundations of surreality. Or perhaps he deliberately mislaid them. The “sur” in surrealism implies “getting beyond,” or “evading” the clutches of Realism. It should be read as meaning both “above” and “below,” in addition to every other direction of escape from the Oppressive Pernicious Prison of Reality.

Our Ancestor was a traumaticist. “As beautiful as the fortuitous meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” has been translated as the experience of “the effects of a systematic bewildering.” This is also Our Ancestor also taught the beautiful and brutal necessity of revelatory trauma and ecstatic brain transplantation.

Our Ancestor would be appalled by today’s professors—perhaps they should be called “contrafessors”—of philosophy who devote much of their contrafessional lives engaged in the effort to convince the youth of Absentia that the most crucial of philosophical endeavors is to determine whether it can be demonstrated that it can be proven whether an “external world” exists. The very endeavor, the mystifying treatment of the issue of whether one can live in complete alienation from the real as an abstract, detached thought-experiment, proves that the world does not truly exist—for them.

Thus far, our contrafessors have succeeded only in convincing the most perceptive of these youth that the brains of many philosophers dwell in vats, while the brains of most other humans do not. On this topic, the grotesque Nain de Jardin of modern philosophy was far ahead of the rest of the pack when he asserted the priority of the rich and traumatic world of life over the barren and anodyne world of abstraction.

We discover in an authoritative Encyclopedia of Philosophy that Our Ancestor “is generally considered to have favored aristocratic government as against democracy.” Our Ancestor himself suggests that what is “generally considered” is most probably wrong, while what is specifically experienced is much more likely to be right. His view of democracy cannot be determined by counting noses, even aristocratic or academic ones.

The same Encyclopedist asserts that Our Ancestor “stresses that the message is not his own invention, but a timeless truth available to any who attend to the way the world itself is.” “To any!” How more “democratic” could one possibly be?

Add to this Our Ancestor’s exhortation to the Ephesians to die and leave the city to children—children in general—and it is clear that he does not advocate the rule of any elite, but rather the healthy non-rule of just any old body, or, more likely, young body, whose mind has not been corrupted and destroyed by illusions and abstractions, whose days are not numbered.

Perhaps Our Ancestor went too far in his radical democratism. But if so, it was because he knew that you and I, like the Ephesians, would not be able to go far enough. Even if we are not willing to kill ourselves entirely perhaps we can at least go part of the way down the road, and become, though it might be rather unbecoming, more like those children.

Our Encyclopedist explains that Our Ancestor “cannot be both a believer in radical flux” and also “an advocate of monism,” for “either he must believe in a merely illusory or at most a limited kind of change, or he must be a pluralist.” Of course, he cannot be, but in actuality, he is. Our Ancestor shuns the circularity of such a path to nowhere. What, indubitably, he cannot do, dubitably, he does.

Our Ancestor rejects all such Encyclopean single vision. It naively demands that one believe in either the Rotten Donkey or the Rose, but ignores the obvious fact that the Rotten Donkey is in the Rose.

The history of philosophy always repeats itself: first as parody, then as farce. By “philosophy” is meant not philosophy itself or its history, but rather what History-Of says about so-called Philosophy. Thus, Our Ancestor, the Unfounding Father of Western (that is, West Asian) dialectic is turned systematically into a simple-minded, non-contradictory, common-sense thinker, a thinker who cannot think the common, the only thing that he thought worth thinking. Then, leaping a couple of millennia to Our Ancestor’s most faithful descendants, History-Of equates their dialectic with everything that is most dogmatic, undialectical, or even anti-dialectical in their thinking.

Our Ancestor explained that “the Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign.” Zeus Anti Zeus is a Riddler, a Revelator, a Symbolizer, a Signifier. Beware of exclusively esoteric and exoteric truth. The truth is always hidden in plain sight. Signifying monkeyshines by the Great Signifying Monkey.

Our Ancestor made the compassionate suggestion that that “the citizens of Ephesus should hang themselves, every one, and leave the city to children.” He was simply asking the long dead kindly not to destroy the minds of the young. Our Ancestor realized that early civilization was already becoming old. Reality had set in.

As Our Ancestor explained, civilization from the outset was a break with an awakened experience of the Logos, of the Dharma, of the Dao, of things themselves, of the testimony of the senses. The infant called civilization was born senile, and it remains a dangerously senile infant. Pre-Ancientism, the “overundertsidewaysist” approach to Reality is “un remède à la maladie infantisénile de la civilization.”

Since it had succumbed to this senile malady, it is appropriate that even History-Of should label this early era “the Ancient World.” It is in response to this degenerative disease of civilization that Our Ancestor chose to remain a loyal Pre-Ancientist.

Everyone since who has not opted out of Reality, everyone in History, has been either Ancient or in interminable recovery from a bad case of Ancientism. We the civilized have never been non-Ancient. Now we find ourselves in Late Ancientism. Even the ancient gets old eventually.

Following Our Ancestor’ path, we realize that we are, one way or another, at the end of the rope called Civilization. Our dilemma: either we untie ourselves or we hang from it.

According to Our Ancestor, there is “One Divine Law” that “prevails as far as it will and suffices for all and is superabundant.” All concocted law is superfluous, or noxious, except as it happens to express this Divine Law, the Surarché that is above Reality and condemns Reality to death.

The Surarché is the Logos. It is the Way of Being and Nature. The world is the sphere of superabundance. It needs no Reality principle, no Law of the Lack to discipline and domesticate wild beings into tamed beasts, a herd that endures the kind of “animal existence” that no wild animal has ever suffered.

Our Ancestor bequeathed us the indispensable insight that “although we need the Word to keep things known in common, people still treat specialists as if their nonsense were a form of wisdom.” This applicable above all to our contemporary contrafessors of philasophy who fiddle with science-fiction scenarios while the world burns.

But why is Our Ancestor more properly a Pre-Ancientist than a Pre-Socratic? No doubt he would admit that he was in some sense “pre-” that which did not yet exist. But the Ancient was already arising and he was in a position to engage in fundamental critique of the emerging disaster. It is said that Our Ancestor’s Work was called “Nature” or “the Muses.” His critique was the critique of nature and of imagination. They spoke through him.

Our Ancestor taught that “much learning (polymathin) does not instruct the mind.” Or as it has also been expressed, “banish wisdom, discard knowledge, and the people will be benefitted a hundredfold,” for “the object of learning is to increase; the object of the Way is to decrease.” The “learning” and “knowledge” that both decry in their day, invented scarcity and the need for increase. Now, in our own day, after millennia of unbridled increase, it threatens to decrease the necessities of life to the point of complete collapse.

Our Ancestor diagnosed perfectly our civilized condition: “In the same way as coals which come near fire, themselves take fire, but apart from it, go out, the part which is cut off from the surroundings in our bodies becomes, through the separation, almost irrational.” This is Ontological Castration. It is the brutal irrationality of abstract reason. It is the folly of reasonable understanding. It is the confusion of clear thinking cut off from encompassing Reason, from the Logos, from the traumatic dialectic, from the world, from nature.

Our Ancestor delivered the harsh judgment that “isolating thought and thereby bringing about a separation from the universal” is not only “error” but also “wickedness.” Those who isolate the universal from the particular are wicked. They murder to vivisect. They bring us a world of burned out cows.

We are running, full speed ahead, running on emptiness, in the sense of lack (not the full to overflowing emptiness of sunyata), running to fill the imaginary void. We are running on mtvness.

Our Ancestor said that “it is the opposite that is good for us.” This homeopathy is true above all of philosophical medicine. It needs to be taken out of the hands of doctors and put into the hands of their opposite.

Our Ancestor observed that “it is death to souls to become water, and death to water to become earth. But water comes from earth; and, from water, soul.” For Our Ancestor, “Earth” signifies the primal matrix of being. “Water” signifies the life forms that arise out of that matrix. And “Soul” signifies the Spirit that arises out of life. The path upward consists of the successive steps of emergence while the path downward consists of the successive steps of devolution.

According to Pre-Ancientist Wisdom, the most beautiful god is ugly compared to an ape. Nevertheless, Our Ancestor himself remarked that “the most beautiful ape is ugly compared to man. The wisest man is an ape compared to god.” Obviously, Our Wily Ancestor attempts here to trip up the naïve reader. He points out the obvious absurdity of one-sided comparisons. Even a god would be a fool if tempted into this game. As he informs us elsewhere, “to a god all things are fair and good and right.” Those who forsake the Logos discover a world full of ugly apes.

Maha Aha! Our Ancestor taught the Maha Yuga. The path up and the path down are one and the same. But only on scales of time and space that cannot easily be read by humans. Our great Pre-Ancientist Ancestor was the great antipostmodernist avant la lettre. He was the Unfounding Father of dialectical reason avant la lettre. He was the Urkritiker of analytical rationality avant la lettre. He co-originated the teaching that Spirit (Logos) gives life while la lettre kills. He showed that the Word is the enemy of the Letter.

For Our Ancestor, to “fall asleep” and “grow moist” certainly does not mean to fall asleep and grow moist. It means losing the awakened mind, becoming undead, being alive but without soul. It is to become vegetative in certain sense. “I regret to report that you have become something like a melon.”

Our Ancestor showed that Lightning does not steer things. Rather, it makes visible the way in which all things steer themselves and do not steer themselves. “All things are steered through all things.” None in itself either steers or is steered. Steering does not steer. It follows the course.

The universe does not consist of ships.

Democracy can only exist among beings capable of realizing that “this world is the same for all.” Democracy is creation out of nothing, but this nothing must be a common nothing.

“Burn, Sagacious Baby, burn!”

The river is a river of fire.

Our Ancestor asserts that “even the best of them choose one thing above all others, immortal glory among mortals.” Since nothing lasts for even two consecutive moments this aspiration poses problems. In a certain sense, the fool’s fifteen minutes of fame is a step in the right direction. It has now become fifteen seconds.

For Our Ancestor, Lightening is that which reveals. For many, the Logos within the multitude of things is lost in obscurity. Lightening is the force that reveals the nature of things abruptly. In most cases, things fall back into immediate obscurity.

For Our Ancestor, Lightning is also a powerful force that strikes us. When one is struck by Lightning, one is electrified, shocked into recognition, awakening. One's being and perceptions are changed so that the world does not retreat entirely back into darkness.

A superficial observer would think that Our Ancestor speaks in "a derogatory manner" when he says that “the most beautiful world order" are something like “a junk heap.” Our Ancestor affirms in this image the inseparable unity in plurality of Cosmos and Chaos. Our Ancestor recognizes the Divinity of Eris.

For Our Ancestor, “Gathering" and "Scattering" are not names for "Good” and “Evil" or “Good” and “Bad.” But like both of these pairs, they illustrate the unity of polarities.

Affirming that “All is One” is highly dangerous, unless one is also capable of affirming that “All is None.”

Our Ancestor reveals that, clearly, in sleep one “touches on the dead.” Though perhaps one does not touch so clearly. There is one kind of sleep in which one is akin to the dead. There is another kind of sleep in which one becomes awake to the dead.

The Lightning Storm enlightens us to the realization that what we all see and hear is the same, and not only not the same. What we understand darkly—in fragments, and as fragments—is seen to be to be also something Common.

The Nightmare of Reason: that Future Dark Night in which all cows are actually black.

Misunderstanding is power.

Bacon died for your frozen pepperoni.

There is direct linage from the early ancient “overlooking” and “underhearing” diagnosed by Our Ancestor to late modern Panopticonism and Panauditronism.

God is sometimes an atheist.

The Wise One is willing, unwilling, both willing and unwilling, willing nor unwilling. “Choose determinism.”

Zeus Schmeus. Logos Schmogos.

Our Ancestor encountered “dieser gräßliche Gott oder Ungott.” Who has been capable of accepting both Being and Non-Being as gifts?

Our Ancestor warned against wanting to get what you want. It is only by getting what you don’t want that what you want becomes what you want. What is given bears no relation to what one wants. It is obvious that one begins with the given but it is less obviously obvious that one also ends with the given.

There is no being apart from arising (pratityasamutpada).

. . . arose/is arose/is arose/is arose/is . . .

. . . becoming/being becoming/being becoming/being . . .

All being is permanently in question (sunyata).

. . . is a rose ? is a rose ? is a rose ? . . .

Our Ancestor was perforce “surrealist in dialectic,” because dialectic is itself surrealist in dialectic.

For Our Ancestor, appearing is metonymorphosis.

Our Ancestor’s tropes are taken wrongly as metaphors. They are metonymies and synecdoches, metonymies of synecdoches, and synecdoches of metonymies. The lyre is not a metaphor for reality, but a realization of reality. The bow is not a metaphor for reality, but a realization of reality. Our Ancestor’s tropes are palintropes. They show that things turn back on the whole and then turn back on themselves.

Our Ancestor demonstrated that the Universe is the length of a human foot. Eternity is a day in an infant’s life. Skip the demonstration if you don’t want your fair share.

Our Ancestor called Polemos, war, “the father of all and the king of all,” and added that “some he has made gods and some men, some bond and some free.” But the hidden Eristic reality is that gods are mortal and mortals are divine. The enslaved possess freedom and masters are in bondage. The passage is a denial of Arché, for Arché is founded on conquest, the end of war, while Polemos has no end.

Polemos is only an Avatar of Eris. “All things come into being and pass away through Eris.” The Logos acts through Eris. The hidden reality is that the father is no father and the king is no king. “It must be known that Polemos is common to all and Eris is justice. All things are born (ginomena) through Eris.”

It is the Goddess Eris who gives birth to all things and to all opposition between things. She makes use of Polemos, though she makes good use. Polemos is a godfriend with benefits.

Our Ancestor lived in the Semi-Tristes Semi-Tropiques. He was an Inside-Outsider, living in the Subtropics on the Periphery of Empire. This is a privileged place of subordination and liberation.

Temperate mind has high-jacked the plane of philosophy and rerouted it toward Empire.

Our Ancestor was a philosopher of place. He was one of the first Great Continental Philosophers. He was from Asia, the Great Continent. He taught us that we must avoid the narrowness of Peninsular thought, and the narrower narrowness of Insular thought.

Our Ancestor co-originated the anarchic critique of the anomic. He was the UnFounding Father of the West Asian lineage just as the Old Child was the AnArchic Architect of the East Asian lineage. Both combated emerging civilization’s incipient project of sundering Physis and Nomos, an enterprise that progressively engulfed the abyss of World History and reached its final theoretical perfection in Anglo-American Post-Philosophy.

Pre-Ancientism is the end of the Postist Project.

Our Ancestor, according to Theophrastus, suffered from melancholia. This is true. However, his opportunity to dwell in the Garden of Melancholy was not mere suffering or affliction, but rather a blessing and a gift. Theophrastus seems to have missed the tragicomically ironic and surrealistically dialectical part of the story,.

Our Ancestor taught that the wisest know the word before it is spoken. The merely wise know it when they hear it. Fools never get it either way.

Our Ancestor was among the first to express the passion for the real. He preferred what is given through sight, hearing, experience—that which continually overturns idea and illusion.

Our Ancestor asks how Homer was deceived by the boys who told him “What we have seen and grasped, these we leave behind; whereas what we have not seen and grasped, these we carry away.” He undoubted failed to see that they were speaking of lice, but he also failed to understand that they were explaining the nature of ideology.

Interpreters of Our Ancestor have struggled with the question of whether he teaches that thinking is common to all things, or merely to all people. On the one hand, we seem forced to conclude that it must be “all things,” since we have good evidence that some people do not think. On the other hand, we seem immediately forced to reach also the opposite conclusion, since (perhaps fortunately for them) these people are also things.

Our Ancestor exhorted us to act out the truth, to show that the merely unconcealed remains concealed.

Our Ancestor shows that those who have “barbarian souls” fail to understand, not because they are inadequately civilized, but because they have lost their savage minds.

Our Ancestor warns that “you will never find the boundaries of the soul, even if you track it on every path.” The path that can be followed is not the eternal path. Its truth lies on a deeper psychogeographical plane.

Our Ancestor, defying single-vision, was no monist, or, as a pluralistic monist or a monistic pluralist, was and was not.

Some think that it is “paradoxical” that for Our Ancestor fire could represent an eternal world order. This is temperate thinking. Our Ancestor lived under the subtropical sun, which he knew as burning, bright, and in constant watch over the Earth. Perhaps it is not the representation, but the sun itself that is paradoxical.

Our Ancestor observed that “the death of earth is to become water, and the death of water is to become air, and the death of air is to become fire, and reversely.” “Death” for our Ancestor is the moment of negation in a process of transformation. The transformation from the existent, to the living, to the sensing, to the reflecting, contemplating, and imagining is a succession of deaths in which nothing dies.

Some shallow logologists assume that when Our Ancestor says that “as they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them,” this reflects his view of the Logos—that the “structure’ of the rivers remains the same as the elements change. But the river is deeper than this shallow logology.

It is not only the waters of the river that are always different. The same river is never the same, and there is no “river-structure” that endures. There is no “river-structure” that protects its watery essence from the flow of the “new waters.”

One truly understands that one steps into the same river only if one knows that the river differs absolutely, even with and from itself. Rivers are the same rivers because they are not the same rivers. Rivers are not the same rivers. It is for this reason that they are called the same rivers.

Our Ancestor noted that “it rests by changing,” for the still point is attained through movement along the way.

While Calling Itself Zeus steers all things, Not Calling Itself Zeus allows them to steer themselves. Zeus is not Zeus. It is for this reason that he is called Zeus.

Our Ancestor must be read prophetically. His critique is ruthless because he speaks on behalf of divine justice. He curses the multitude out of compassion. His curses it back to the sacred and the Common.

Single-minded interpreters of Our Ancestor make him the champion of “law and order” and the enemy of “civil strife.” They seem to forget that he renounced arché and taught the necessity of strife. He was an Eris-intoxicated man. He championed the law of disorder and the custom of chaos. He taught that “opposition brings concord,” and that “out of discord comes the fairest harmony.”

We must agree to disagree with ourselves.

Our ancestor did not teach that the unjust is ultimately just. He taught that justice is ultimate. Justice will ultimately prevail in the world of the just and unjust.

The road up to oneness and down to manyness is tortuous, but the road up to manyness and down to oneness is slightly less tortuous.

Our ancestor taught that the path into the sunlight is one with the path into the dark night. He taught that that clarity is unclear without obscurity.

Our Ancestor taught that in the universal Polemos the opposite forces are not always opposite forces.

Our Ancestor was neither a monist nor a nomist.

Our Ancestor taught that both harmony and opposition “bind together” and also unbind.

The sun has always, in time that counts, been the great symbol of hierarchical power and unfettered domination. But Our Ancestor teaches that the Great Goddess Dike imposes limits on the Solar Deity, so that the sunlight can exceed his limits.

Our Ancestor observed that “all the things we see when awake are death, even as all we see in slumber are sleep.” If we are awake, we see, we are awake to, the death of all things. If we are sleep (not “dreaming”) we see the sleep (note, not the “life”!) of all things. We see neither the life nor death. We are undead, deadened, if we do not come to face to face with death.

Our Ancestor revealed that the Sleep of Reason (the Lethe of Logos) breeds Petrified Monsters.

Our Ancestor observed that one strikes a light in the night, while another walks in darkness through the day.

Our Ancestor observed that in dreaming, “we touch the dead,” or allow the dead to come alive, and touch us. In dreaming, we do not enter the realm of the dead, but rather allow it to enter us. We “strike a light” for “ourselves” so that we can see the others.

Even those who are most isolated in the everyday world can enter into the nocturnal community, the “World of the Night.”

Our Ancestor said that even the sleeping are “laborers and co-workers in what takes place in the world.” The nature of their sleep determines the nature of their world.

Our Ancestor clarified the situation as follows: “Mortals, immortals, immortals, mortals, the one living the other's death and dying the other's life.” This admirably lucid passage is met with confusion and contortion when Our Subtle Ancestor is subjected to literalistic interpretation (much as when the Six Realms are really thought to be about narrow necks, etc.).

Indeed, the literalistic reader of the non-literal can attribute to Our Ancestor the idea that “the gods live the death of mortals in that, in their self-understanding and their understanding of being, they hold themselves over against the transience of humans and the all-too-finite manner in which humans understand what is.” Unfortunately, Godot was absent that day.

For Our Ancestor, the Upward and Downward Path includes all forms of being, from those of mere existence, through those of life, to those of spirit. Each successive form lives through the death, the supersession, of that which led to it, and is dead, superseded, in the life of that to which it leads. Yet, the dead is at the same time never dead, for it lives on in the other. Aufhebung.

For Our Ancestor, the Immortal is the Logos and the Mortal is the multitude of things. Moreover and moreunder, the Mortal and Immortal are dialectically related to one another. The Logos expresses itself (lives) through the appearing and disappearing (dying) of the multitude of things. The transient (dying) things have their being through their place in the path (life) of the Logos.

Our Ancestor was the first philosophical prophet of the Death of God and of the Resurrection of All Things. The pebbles on the Ephesian shore cried out and lifted themselves up!

Our Ancestor’s view of the afterlife is that we are living it now. We are the ones we were, and we are the ones we are not waiting for.

Our Ancestor understood that Nature breaks all of its own laws. Where one seeks “rhythmic alternation” one often finds arhythmic non-alternation. Not all poles are opposites and not all opposites are poles. Nature’s orderly disorder is a discordant harmony. The image of harmony imposed on the surface of things disguises the harmony at the heart of things.

Our Ancestor proclaimed that “Living is child’s play,” and that “kingship belongs to the child.” This is more evidence that his injunction to turn Ephesus over to the children was more than mere mockery of adults. The child at play, like the Logos, rules without ruling. The rules of play are to have no rules. The ruler who rules by ruling succumbs to ruling. So if War is “king of all,” it must be “child’s play” in which the player is the farthest thing from “lord of the universe.”

As Our Ancestor observed, “the best”—the best of fools—risk everything for fame and glory among mortals, while the multitude—the mass of fools—gorge themselves like domesticated beasts. The error is to choose either “one thing in exchange for all,” or “all things in exchange for one.”

As Our Ancestor observed, “Gods and men honor those who fall in battle.” But, ironically, they honor only those who fall conspicuously. Gods and men must learn that in truth all deserve honor.

Our Ancestor taught the pursuit of Deep Logology.

Our Ancestor said that the road up and the road down are one and the same because of their multiplicity and because they differ one from another. The road up and the road down are quite different roads to the traveler. They are two and the same. And different roads make different travelers.

Our Ancestor observed perceptively that “it is hard to fight against passion, for what it wants it buys at the expense of the soul.” This is why passion is so good for the good soul. Our Ancestor is saying that we must fight with passion, not against it. One act of righteous indignation is more powerful than a million abstract judgments concerning right. An act of righteous indignation is an act of the soul that has been converted to what is right.

The gods are born out of our souls, and die back into them, just as our souls are born out of life, and die back into it. Thus, the gods live our deaths and are dead in our lives.

Artemis was “pre-Greek.” Artemis was Artemis before Artemis. Her inspiration is indigenous and Ur-Asian, from the days of One Sun, before the world was divided into Asia, the Land of the Rising Sun, and Europe, the Land of the Setting Sun. Epheus was the site of the great Temple of Artemis Before Artemis, called The Lady of Ephesus.

The Lady of Ephesus was called “the Light Bearer." Our Ancestor’s message was given to him through the chance and necessity of birth and place. It is noted that Our Ancestor is said to have placed his book in the Temple of Artemis, so that “the general public would not have access to it.” This is a slander on Our Ancestor, confusing his reverence for the Source of Light with an act of petty resentment.

Our Ancestor was compelled to think of Artemis even when he was thinking against Artemis. Hers was the realm not only of childbirth and generation, but of children and childhood. The World of the Child, and of the Wild. Single-minded commentators keep this resolutely out of mind when they read that Our Ancestor counseled turning over the city to children.

Divine Wisdom, in calling and not calling itself Zeus, shows itself to be one and not one. How many fragments does it take to get this idea across?

Heraclitus’s text is in fragments since it has been broken over so many heads.

The name “Zeus” and “Zēnon” ¬ is associated with the ideas of life, living, and to live “zēn.” And it is true that for Divine Wisdom to call itself and not call itself Zeus means that the wise do not separate life from death. But it would be a mistake to see the larger picture of Logos merely as “cosmic order,” established by Divine Wisdom. It is also “chaotic disorder’ ordained by Divine Foolishness.

In Our Ancestor’s account of the Path of Fire, things are burned up and things are burned down.

Our Ancestor discovered that Logos, the Spirit, is identical with its movement through opposition or strife between all things. He discovered the “war of all against all, “but also discovered that it was universal peace. He saw that “antitheses” are never “synthesized” unless we call “synthesis” their ultimate identity with the Logos, the Spirit that remains forever unsynthesized with itself, the One that remains at Many with itself.

As Our Ancestor intimated, the Royal Road to Truth is an anarchic road. To travel it, one must ride an all-terrain Vehicle. Our Ancestor, like others to come, called this vehicle the Vajra. His radicalism was deeply rooted in tradition. Already in Our Ancestor’s time, the Vajra had been venerated for a thousand years across his native continent.

One must invoke the thunderbolt to be struck by it. It cannot be demanded, command, or ordered. One may be unworthy of truth because one is unprepared for it, or because one is too prepared for it. This is the meaning of expecting the unexpected—and of unexpecting the expected.

Meditation is absolute obedience to the thought through no-thought. The thought-through no thought. It is thinking with no clinging or attachment. Meditation is thinking without mediation that reveals mediations. Meditation is a bridge, a mediation, between one abyss and another, between one bridge and another.

First thought best thought. Except when it isn’t. A first thought is often followed by another first thought.

Our Ancestor elaborated: “Graspings: wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all.” Seize the means of conception and be seized by them. Think contradiction and allow it to think you. To think through you. To think you through. Follow Truth on the path beyond “All is One.” One is also All. All is also None.

We pledge allegiance to the Disunited States of Amyriad. As a descendent of Our Ancestor once phrased it “E Unibus Plurum.” We ride away on our speeding, careening Pluribus. Ecartibus Absolutibus.

Our Ancestor urges: Keep your eye on the aion, not on the clock. We must admit that the Tin Pan Woods Man expressed it well: “Why does it play, the great child of the world-play brought into view in the aion? It plays, because it plays.” Sometimes convicted criminals get Eastern religion.

All Ones are “Thing.”

Fire is the Universal Medium of Exchange. “All things for fire” and “fire for all things.” Thus, T-F-T, and, more fundamentally, F-T-F. In our Ancestral Economy, both buyer and seller are consumed in the exchange. Fire is the ultimate self-negating Variable Capital. In that it harkens back to the Gift Economy. It is the End of Capital.

Our Ancestor deserves the title of Midwife in the world historical event of Bibliobirth. The papyrus scroll migrated from the Subtropical Delta only a century before, along the way transforming itself from a tool of domination to a domain of imagination.

Our Ancestor said there is no way to step into the same river even once, because you are, in many ways, already stepping into many rivers and many times. Steps are vanishing moments that endure through their vanishing.

The Way is like an Ocean on the wave. The Way is very, very vague. The wave is very, very vague. The methodless Method is to rest in the wave.

First there is a mountain, then there is no river, then there is.

You can’t step into the same river twice. You are swept away. You are riverized.

You can’t step into the same river twice. The power of its riverberation transforms you forever.

You can’t step into the same since there is no path in that direction.

Always (never) already (not yet) thinking the same river.

Always afraid to step into the real river.

Stepping into the not-same river, the river steps back.

Raft of word, a passage to the nearer shore.

They inadvertently speak the absurd abysmal truth. We are living "in the gulf.” Falling together!

When you step into the river, the river runs into you.

The river runs through us. We are river-ran.

The river is Our Ancestor.

* It is possible that many of these meditations are not in the correct order. Each meditation or group of meditations was written on a scrap of paper and the scraps were collected. Alas, while walking upstairs I dropped the pile. Out of respect for the Principle of Objective Chance I re-collected the scattered scraps as they had fallen. But then, while walking downstairs, I again dropped the pile. I again re-collected the scattered scraps as they had fallen. Let us hope that the second scattering and collecting succeeded either in correcting the first scattering and collecting, or in improving upon the original order.

1. Notably by “Anonymous” in Arsenal 3 (1976).

2. As even the Oxbridge Pictionary of Dildosophy admits, albeit only implicitly/\.